Twikini – Initial Review

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my phone OS to Windows Mobile 6.5 and my initial reaction is more phew than anything else. Upgrading to a non-official ROM always comes with tonnes of risk. One major by product of upgrading to this particular ROM is that my favourite WinMo Twitter app doesn’t work yet on .NET CF 3.7. After reading some intial reviews, I decided to give Twikini a try.

Twikini provides all of the basic features of Twitter such as reply and re-tweeting. It also allows you to shorten URLs and post pics and separates between your friends’ stream, replies and direct messages. One interesting feature is that it can automatically tweet whatever music or song you’re listening to on your Windows Mobile device. One nice thing about it is that it’s not written in .NET which translates to running pretty quickly on your mobile device. Twikini is a rather simple app which is both its strength and its weakness. It all really depends on who is the user of the app. For instance, I think it’s a fabulous app if you’re just monitoring your stream of friends. It’s simple to use and focuses on the core functions such as tweeting, replies, re-tweeting and favouriting a tweet. There is very little getting used to as it keeps the Windows Mobile paradigm of smart buttons. If you need more advanced features like groups or posting from multiple services (for me, it’s ping.fm) then Twikini isn’t there yet.

Some of the immediate shortcomings of Twikini that they should be able to fix with relative ease is giving users the ability to follow another user and give users a count of new messages based on friends stream, replies and direct messages. One of the question marks will be if the simplicity and speed will entice end users to pay $5.95 when they can get PockeTwit for free.